Hey there,
I am writing in hopes of getting some help with an account suspension. I have created a ticket but it has gone unanswered for a few days now so I thought I would try here. I was suspended for 30 days due to “Unauthorized Account Access”, and I had no idea what this meant. At first I thought I must have been hacked but my password was never changed so I ruled that out.
After much digging I found others had also been suspended for this before, and all of them had the same issue - a VPN. I occasionally use a VPN and may have played WoW while connected. I believe this may have triggered something and caused me to be suspended.
I’m looking to appeal the suspension and would love some clarity on this, as well as clarity on the rules surrounding VPN usage. I don’t want this to happen again!
If you have not done it already, you need to file an appeal.
https://us.battle.net/support/en/help/product/wow/181/1609/solution
Other than that, there isn’t really anything that can be done here as we are not allowed to discuss one’s account actions.
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VPN use is allowed but not supported. Sadly, some nefarious people use VPN’s for nothing good, so it can be possible to land on a VPN that has been used for bad things. Blizzard is quite adept at recognising VPN’s though.
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Right now tickets are taking upwards of four days due to staff working from home and the new expansion with it’s hiccups. Please keep your ticket open and it will be answered in the order that it was received.
Been using a VPN to connect to WoW and to D3. They shoud have record of me connecting to D3 last year too.
Doing just fine.
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I’m having the same issue. Got some clarity today.
Apparently my password was reset and someone from another country logged in for less than an hour and the password was reset again.
I understand the suspicion but where was security when this happened a month ago?
This all happened without my knowledge.
I can think of several ways that could happen but they all involve either a compromised vpn and/or email address.
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They will lock your account down if they think something fishy is going on. Ultimately it’s your responsibility to keep up on that sort of thing. It would have sent out an e-mail, but if the e-mail account was altered or compromised too, it would be an added level of an issue. If you don’t have an authenticator on your account, you’re leaving yourself open to this kind of thing.
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When the account gets locked for security reasons it sends an email to your registered email account that you use for Bnet. Only you have access to that (I hope) so you would be notified.
Investigation tends to look at what happened during that hour someone else was logged in.
Hackers strip the account, sell the gold, advertise, and generally do bad things.
Boosters complete quests, grind reps/honor/rep currency, get arena or PvP wins, etc.
If someone was in your email and deleted the notices you got for password reset, that should be a huge warning flag for your security. You will want to do a malware scan and a virus scan then change passwords when done. Also consider an email account with secondary authentication like Gmail. Oh, and put an Authenticator on your Bnet account.
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Actually just started the malware scan. I’ve only had this rig for about two weeks now. Thanks for the idea.
I do have an Authenticator however it has been alerted to me before about attempts to get the code from Taiwan and I believe China? I didn’t think anything of it and believed the security in place took care of it.
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It did. For someone to get around your Auth they need to you to give them the code from/authorize it. Otherwise they have to have cloned it to a device they have. That requires your phone, the serial number for your software download, and your personal restore code. Then they can clone it to a different device.
Hackers do nothing good to accounts. If an actual hacker got in, your account would be stripped, gold gone, chars moved, etc. They don’t take accounts to level them, get achievements, do raids, etc.
If nothing bad happened to your account, then you did not have hackers in it.
STILL a very good idea to run a full malware scan then change passwords and ensure all your security is up to date on everything - not just Bnet. Email, banking, etc.
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The only thing I can really think of was swapping my phone recently but I didn’t think I wiped it. I took it to one of those kiosks to get cash for it. But I doubt this could lead anywhere.
My current phone has my Authenticator and hasn’t had a problem yet.
This account has had a Authenticator since physical ones were a thing.
My parents made sure I had everything up to date.
Hell I even had parental controls still stuck on my account till I was 25 haha.
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Not unless they had your email/password for your Bnet account as well as the Auth. Oh, and access to your email. Phones are not exactly the best thing to give to someone without deleting personal data though.
Still malicious parties don’t do good things. Account sharing investigations usually rule out hackers because of what they do to trash an account.
Hopefully just a false positive with a VPN.
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I hope so too. I went to a Shadowlands launch event with some buddies. About 8 of us LAN partying in a big house. (Go ahead and laugh)
None of them seemed to be hit by this and I know nobody was on my account since my computer is always locked when I’m not away or just off.
I’m not sure about a VPN since I’m not familiar with them myself and it wasn’t off my usual internet but I will have to ask.
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Nah, not laughing 
I used to do this kind of thing when it was literally the only way to play multiplayer. 'Cause the best access any of us had to the ASCII-based / unix shell account “internet” was 14.4, and doing it that way (dialing direct into your friends computer - no servers) was two players max.
Doom II and Quake, baby!
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Well just got back with Blizzards reply.
My 30 days is being upheld with very little information or reasoning.
I’m done with this shot support and game.
Enjoy.
They do that to keep people from getting the info they want to cheat the system.
So… someone ‘in another country’ hacked your account, changed the password, played around with it for an hour, then changed the password back? And apparently left the account at least intact enough so that you didn’t notice anything. You recognize how suspicious that sounds, but do you also understand how implausible that scenario is? Especially since you have an authenticator that would make it virtually impossible to accomplish without your help?
That would be akin to some stranger picking the lock to your house, watching TV for a while, without so much as helping themselves to the beer in the fridge, then locking back up when they left.
I’m not at all surprised. I think you probably aren’t, either.
You as well. Good luck wherever your gaming takes you.
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If my security was an issue, why wasn’t Blizzard there when the issue occurred? Instead waiting to compile everyone in a mass ban before a major patch, knowing damn well the ticket log would be flooded by then.
Once someone is already banned why not give up full information to that person once they prove identity?
Who would continue to pay for this crap?
Meanwhile it looks like GMs are too busy on another massive forum RPing and getting paid to enjoy themselves when tickets are running 4 days now? Reassign towards the workload.
The security of your account is your responsibility, not Blizzard’s. I would recommend you shore it up before you walk away. I’d hate for you to come back at some point only to find it had been compromised again.
So they could tweak their methods to avoid detection the next time? I think it’s fairly obvious why they wouldn’t give specific details of what happened or how it was detected.
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